Ages ago I helped a friend make a website. Today I got a renewal notification. Apparently I’ve been paying for his site for years without noticing it. I called to shut it down, and they told me tough luck. Nope, I’m required to keep paying for it just because.

Just to be clear, GoDaddy is a fraud organization on par with AT&T or AOL back in the day, where they’d make it impossible for you to stop getting billed. Same thing.

As surely as AOL and AT&T were legit ten years ago, so is GoDaddy legitimate now, which is to say “barely at all,” best I can tell.

You signed up, sure, but they make it exceptionally difficult to stop giving them money, even (and especially) for services you no longer use. That’s how they make their money. You know those Super Bowl ads aren’t free, right?

If everyone used their services to the extent promised, they’d go broke. Most of use just use a fraction, and that’s fine, but when we want to cancel services, we should be allowed to.

It took five tries calling in to reach an actual person, at which point I was told that even though my name is on the account, I couldnt’t take my credit card off of it. Mind you, the site has been dead for at least three to four years. There’s literally nothing there.

I asked which credit card was on file? Nope, can’t even access that. “If you figure out which one, you can file a dispute with your credit card to contest it…” What? That’s not how business is done.

Their solution to billing me for something I don’t want and won’t pay for is to wait until they charge me for it, then argue with my bank that it was bogus from the beginning. That’s impossible, since I authorized it, even if it was YEARS ago. And they know that damn well. There’s literally no way to stop giving them money, even for domains and accounts you don’t use.

No. No my friend. I talked with Isaiah Ratford, who was extremely polite and helpful, courteous even in the face of my escalating frustration, but GoDaddy.com is a worthless pile of crap, with whom no one should ever do business, period.

Sure, they may sue me for defamation or some such nonsense, but it’s wholly without merit. The attention would be more likely to attract a class action suit against them for their horrible practices than anything, and I have nothing to take.

Brian first began peddling his humorous wares with a series of Xerox printed books in fifth grade. Since then he's published over two thousand satire and humor articles, as well as eight stage plays, a 13-episode cable sitcom and three (terrible) screenplays. He is a freelance writer by trade and an expert in the field of viral entertainment marketing. He is the author of many of the biggest hoaxes of recent years, a shameful accomplishment in which he takes exceptional pride.